Chris Hogg says good ideas come from constant exposure to external sources, not solitary thinking. He uses a feed reader to scan blogs on digital health and technology, and stays active on Twitter and at meetups. After founding 100+, he stopped reading and engaging online, and his idea generation stalled.
[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] So one of the questions was, where do good ideas come from? For me, I don't believe in the thinker, you know, you sit in a room and you just think a lot and ideas come. I think ideas are all out there. So I read a ton. Every day I'm kind of obsessed with my feed reader. I'm very, very narrow. I care about very, very little in the world. I care about digital health, technology transformation of healthcare, and my family, and that's about it. So that's what I read. It's very efficient. I can read the first 2 sentences of a blog post and kill it or keep reading because I know exactly it's just, I'm just not interested. And then I believe in going out with other people and hearing their ideas. Good ideas build off of each other. There's no such thing as an idea that comes out fully formed. And so I would actually say one of the things I did wrong when I was at 100+ is I did all of this super really well leading up to the founding of that company. And then when I started, I stopped. I was so micro and so focused on that one idea and what I was doing, I stopped going to meetups. I really wasn't active on Twitter. I stopped reading. I stopped blogging. And it was really interesting. I look back and sort of the idea generation, the forming of ideas just stopped for me. Because I was so micro. And that was a big mistake. It's really hard to keep your head up when you're doing this. But that's really important. That's why you're here is because you have your head up and you're looking over the horizon at things that you think should be.
